Basically, this question cannot be answered. However, it should be considered. There is a small but significant number of modern first - and second-hand accounts of autochthonous terrestrial carnivores attacking and sometimes consuming humans almost everywhere in the world (Kruuk 2002:64-65, 75), although not all such encounters end in violence. This is as true for hyenas as it is for other large carnivores (van Lawick-Goodall and van Lawick-Goodall 1970, Owens and Owens 1984). Nevertheless, there are enough tragic accounts to assume that ethnographic analogy would be useful for developing preliminary inferences about Pleistocene human and carnivore interactions. Of course, there would have to be allowances made for differences due to modern human population size and territorial encroachment. Today, humans numerically dominate carnivores, but the opposite was probably the case throughout most of the Pleistocene. Technological changes through time would also have to be weighed in the balance. Because our perimortem bone damage signature so much involves hyena activity, we will focus on them, even though in the back of our minds we are fully aware that predation by other carnivores must have been an everpresent danger to Pleistocene Siberians, especially children. The danger level would have correlated with human and predator population sizes, values that we have no precise way to determine. We can estimate the number of individual predators from cave sites, but such estimates would have to be adjusted for the amount of time deposition occurred in a cave. If we assume that the amount of deposition time is roughly the same for all caves, then a relative danger level can be proposed. For example, Baryshnikov and Vereschagin (1996) found that in 12 West European cave sites 135 hyena first lower molars were found, the average per cave being 11.3. By way of comparison, Ovodov and Martynovich (n. d.) recovered 246 lower first molars in Razboinich’ya Cave. They proposed that at least 137 animals are represented. These values suggest that the danger to humans by hyenas was at least as great in the Altai Mountains as it was in West Europe.
Assuming that hyenas were a danger to late Pleistocene Siberians, is there any evidence they hunted humans? We have evidence that they ate humans. The remains could represent hunting events, but could also represent scavenging. We propose that scavenging might have been practiced more during the warmer months, when the ground had thawed. Hunting of humans might have been practiced more frequently during the colder times of the year, when finding anything to eat was difficult, especially digging in the frozen ground.
World History
